discernment and delight

humility amid the minders: Mark 9

It would have been a heady experience to walk Galilean roads in he the company of the prophet from Nazareth. Not only was the intimacy of life shared with him available to precious few. His select ‘disciples’ could also look back on the experience of having been chosen by name.

Most of us do not wake one morning with aspirations of greatness that had never afflicted us before. Rather, the accumulation of perquisites that gather around modest success gradually adds up to something. Sometimes it is lethal.

We so easily begin to sense that we merit these things, these minders, this cell phone, the undeniable whiff of prestige that follows us about, this company car. We begin to sense our greatness. We never asked for it, yet it is there in the professionally servile glances of these minders.

It grows on us.

Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest.

Though the image of the impoverished fisherman out fending off the wolf of hunger by braving the sea’s waves in the early morning may owe more to romanticism than to reality, Jesus’ followers seem generally to have come from modest origins.

Uninvited, aspirations of grandeur had crept into their psyches and eventually into their conversation. Jesus knew its remedy:

He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

This is not Jesus’ more famous declaration about becoming like a child. Yet is counter-intuitive impulse does not lie far. The first of his recorded asseverations about true greatness hits the hardest. To be first emerges from a long patten of making oneself last. It is birthed by the habit and practice of serving.

The clear edges of Jesus’ dictum leave little room for the creeping entitlement that success weaves into our souls.

One chooses, this day, to serve, to stand last. Or one becomes the absurd icon of grown men walking along a road trying to decide which one is the biggest.